Changing the Basis for Articulation

Abstract

When foreign language educators come together to talk about articulation, the discussion usually tends to focus on what articulation is not, rather than what it should be. Teachers swap horror stories of students that after six years of instruction in a language are placed in a second semester class at a university, or students that get A's in middle school and drop to C's and D's during their first semester at the senior high. We cringe and shake our heads saying that we need better articulation. It's not better refinement of the current system that we need; it is a different, agreedupon basis for connecting instruction and experiences across years of language learning. The reality of language program articulation in the US today is that it is based on a course curriculum or syllabus. Teachers keep trying to tinker with their curriculum in the unrealistic hope that by listing and teaching the right language components, students will be prepared to tackle the next course's set of language elements. The fallacy of this hope is that it rests on the notion that language is a tightly sequential experience. We keep trying to discover the mystical or natural sequence of language structures and vocabulary that will allow students to move smoothly from one class to the next. Yet our teaching experiences prove the opposite: students do not master language elements, that is, develop a comfortable command of a structure, during the first course in which they are exposed to them. Object pronouns, for example, taught and drilled for two months in eighth grade are not used smoothly and naturally by those students until repeated practice occurs in the next several years of language learning. We should expect students to not be fluent in using lo, la, and le in ninth grade after only an eighth grade experience with them. Students will be more likely to avoid using pronouns than to remember to use se lo. Only after several years of practice will se lo di replace di el dinero a mi amigo in answer to gDiste el dinero a tu amigo? Observation of student learning convinces us that language learning is a spiral. Articulation based on coverage of a curriculum sequence leads to our current system where students on September 1, regardless of their real progress to higher levels of proficiency, jump to the next course. Coverage says that the teacher taught the language elements. If the student didn't learn them, the system adds to teacher and student frustration by pushing the student ahead anyway, in lock-step fashion. This is what thwarts our attempts at articulation: students don't progress at exactly the same rate. Students do follow the same paths to increasingly sophisticated language proficiency. Starting from the vision created by the National Standards in Foreign Language Learning, we need to change the basis for articulation. Our focus needs to be on student learning, the process of becoming more proficient in using another language. Our national standards provide the common vision of five key elements that must be a part of language learning for it to have value and meaning for students K-16. While communication is our expertise, the standards remind us that language is not our content, but that students need and want to use their new language to learn of, participate in, and talk about culture, connections, comparisons, and communities. Language learning becomes a much richer experience when focused on learning for communication and through communication, not just about communication. Articulation up to the present has been focused on teaching about communication. For teachers of Spanish, unique resources exist for implementing the vision of the national standards. Spanish has the luxury of being the most commonly taught language in the US, which encourages publishers and realia companies to produce a wide variety of materials. We also are fortunate to live in one of the largest Spanish-